The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to communications in a machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless wide area network (WAN). Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, sensor data, tracking data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple devices. In some examples, these devices may be sensors and/or meters configured to collect data and transmit this data to an end server via a base station. These sensors and/or meters may be referred to as M2M devices. Base stations may communicate with M2M devices on forward and reverse links. Each base station has a coverage range, which may be referred to as the coverage area of the cell. An M2M device may transmit data to a base station on the reverse link.
The base station may transmit data to M2M devices according to a traffic cycle during a traffic slot of one or more forward link frames. Data intended for more than one M2M device may be transmitted in a same traffic slot. With traditional communication systems, when an M2M device is expecting data in a shared traffic channel, the device would wake up to read data transmitted in each traffic slot until it finds its data. This traditional approach is an inefficient use of power of the M2M device.